Robot human cooperation for bone cutting through detection

In robot-assisted orthopedic surgery, an image-guided robot provides great assistance in accurate bone preparation by its rapid and accurate positioning capability. However, most of these robots are lack of tactile sensing or sufficient intelligence required for medical applications. It was found that the steering was not sufficiently taking into account of all possible situations and may damage the patient´s muscle tissue. Some might even cause irreparable damage to surrounding tissue. An efficient but safe technique is thus needed. In this paper we proposed a human robot cooperative operation method by which the robotic system can intelligently detect the critical situation with human´s supervisory steering, for example, where the cutter has cut through the bone. By this method the robot system can accomplish a safe and accurate bone cutting with a complement of an imageless navigation system and results in a low cost, but safe and effective surgical robot system.